I don’t know if these things are mutually exclusive – as orbit_f says, “cohesion” is about relationships, and those relationships are in the end always constructed only in the act of listening, regardless of what the composer might think they’re putting into the piece (and this holds true even for ostensibly straightforward melodic or rhythmic material: there’s never any guarantee that the listener will hear things the way the composer intended them)… even if you simply throw a bunch of stuff together in a completely random fashion and then listen to the results repeatedly, more often than not you’ll start noticing “meaningful” relationships, i.e. a degree of cohesion (unless we take “cohesion” to mean exclusively a certain amount of predictability, for example the aforementioned structures of call-and-response, build-up, repetition etc.). I’d encourage to experiment and look for cohesion where it doesn’t immediately seem to exist – and maybe as a practical tip, I’d try to keep the source material within some kind of pretty strict limits so that the results will edit more easily together. (I also hope this doesn’t confuse matters further!)
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